As the blander words had begun falling, Our Father, that she knew by heart, our daily bread, she should have felt comforted. She should of. Should of.

Where was Meg, though?

Mrs Hogben separated herself from the others. Walking stiffly. If any of the men noticed, they took it for granted she had been overcome, or wanted to relieve herself.

She would have liked to relieve herself by calling: ‘Margaret Meg wherever don’t you hear me Me-ehg?’ drawing it out thin in anger. But could not cut across a clergyman’s words. So she stalked. She was not unlike a guinea-hen, its spotted silk catching on a strand of barbed-wire.

When they had walked a little farther, round and about, anywhere, they overheard voices.

‘What’s that?’ asked Meg.

‘Me mum and dad,’ Lummy said. ‘Rousin’ about somethun or other.’

Mum Whalley had just found two bottles of unopened beer. Down at the dump. Waddayaknow. Must be something screwy somewhere.

‘Could of put poison in it,’ her husband warned.

‘Poison? My arse!’ she shouted. ‘That’s because I found it!’

‘Whoever found it,’ he said, ‘who’s gunna drink a coupla bottlesa hot beer?’

‘I am!’ she said.

‘When what we brought was good an’ cold?’

He too was shouting a bit. She behaved unreasonable at times.

‘Who wanted ter keep what we brought? Till it got good an’ hot!’ she shrieked.

Sweat was running down both the Whalleys.

Suddenly Lum felt he wanted to lead this girl out of earshot. He had just about had the drunken sods. He would have liked to find himself walking with his girl over mown lawn, like at the Botanical Gardens, a green turf giving beneath their leisured feet. Statues pointed a way through the glare, to where they finally sat, under enormous shiny leaves, looking out at boats on water. They unpacked their cut lunch from its layers of fresh tissue-paper.

‘They’re rough as bags,’ Lummy explained.

‘I don’t care,’ Meg Hogben assured.

Nothing on earth could make her care – was it more, or was it less?

She walked giddily behind him, past a rusted fuel-stove, over a field of deathly feltex. Or ran, or slid, to keep up. Flowers would have wilted in her hands, if she hadn’t crushed them brutally, to keep her balance. Somewhere in their private labyrinth Meg Hogben had lost her hat.

When they were farther from the scene of anger, and a silence of heat had descended again, he took her little finger, because it seemed natural to do so, after all they had experienced. They swung hands for a while, according to some special law of motion.

Till Lum Whalley frowned, and threw the girl’s hand away.

If she accepted his behaviour it was because she no longer believed in what he did, only in what she knew he felt. That might have been the trouble. She was so horribly sure, he would have to resist to the last moment of all. As a bird, singing in the prickly tree under which they found themselves standing, seemed to cling to the air. Then his fingers took control. She was amazed at the hardness of his boy’s body. The tremors of her flinty skin, the membrane of the white sky appalled him. Before fright and expectation melted their mouths. And they took little grateful sips of each other. Holding up their throats in between. Like birds drinking.